Histoire d’un aller et retour

• Main Author: Noël Coye
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme 2009-10-01
• Series: Les Nouvelles de l’Archéologie
• Subjects: collections; history of archaeology; history of geography; lake dwellings; western Switzerland
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/nda/752
• ISSN: 0242-7702; 2425-1941

At the end of the 19th century, the Neuchâtel born Arnold Guyot gathered in Princeton a collection of antiquities from the Western Switzerland lake dwellings. In July, 2007 the department of Geology of Princeton University offered this rich archaeological series to the Laténium (archaeological museum of Neuchâtel). Our paper deals with the history of this collection between these two dates and with the reasons of its arrival in the United States and its return to Switzerland some 130 years later. Exiled in the United States, Arnold Guyot was professor of Geology and Physical Geography from 1854. He was in charge of the development of the museum of the University where many geological collections and a few archaeological series can be seen. In this context, he gathered a collection of lake dwellings antiquities, bought for the main part, from a collector named Victor Gross. This collection is a testimony of the important development of lake dwellings archaeology in the Neuchâtel area during the 1870s. It found its logical place in the museum of the department of geology of Princeton, due to the universal conception of human progress that characterized prehistoric archaeology of the 19th century. From the beginning of the 20th century, prehistory and protohistory redefined their concepts. The Guyot collection became, above all, relevant in an European perspective and its keeping in Princeton became a problem for its study and knowledge. This situation led to its return in Switzerland in 2007. Nowadays, the Guyot collection has become again an object for scientific research and museum exhibition.